Grief Tending
I wish to speak of our Grief Tending Ritual, held at the Great Salt Lake just before Halloween this year. Seven people came. There was a rock concert going on. We performed the ritual on the salt flats just north of the overflow parking. Something happened in our doing it together. Amy Brunvand spoke mythic words, a poem she'd written in response to her experience of the Grief Tending Ritual last spring. I offer her poem here, with gratitude.
Grief Tending Ritual, Great Salt Lake
Rato ramro, guliyo mitho — Nepali proverb
Grief flies in mated pairs
Gulls crying loneliness
Salt-crusted ripples
Drought traced in sand
Salt stiffened feathers
Aligned by receding water
Salt desiccated mummy
With the redspot beak of a gull
Ragged mountains floating
On a salty mirage of tears
Red sunset sky, red water,
Red, red broken grief
Beating heartsong drum
Bright shining as the air
Grief for evaporation
Flat salt-poisoned mud
Grief for shorebirds
Their marshes and rivers
Grief for freeway taillights,
Blinking smokestack beacons
Grief for the distant glow
Electric brightlight city
Grief for the red-eye drone
With its camera panopticon
Grief for ourselves
Followed always by the dead
Tears for the world of wounds
Caught in a glass bowl
Caught in sighing waves
Caught in a drybone rattle
Caught in the sugar sweet
Red mackerel clouded sky
Caught in damp footprints
People, animals, birds
Walking to the water’s edge
To pour out their tears
Into the Great Basin of grief
That holds all which flows to it
Into salt water that releases
Only things that vaporize or fly.
— Amy Brunvand